"Vielmetter Los Angeles gallery is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a group show (open by appointment) that features works by artists who are represented by or have been shown in the gallery over the years. It’s a reunion that brings together work by important L.A. artists, including Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Math Bass, Liz Glynn, Shana Lutker, Kim Dingle, Steve Roden, Ruben Ochoa and the late Laura Aguilar.

Plus, there’s a must-see backroom installation by Sean Duffy, titled “Alone Now,” that feels just right for our era: an apocalyptic man cave that features all manner of assemblage and hacked-together machinery."

By Carolina Miranda - 24 July 2020

"The series of bronze statues by Wangechi Mutu that currently adorns the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade is scheduled to be on public display until early November. But two of the four pieces, “The Seated I” and “The Seated III,” will remain at the museum long after the exhibition closes as a part of its collections, the Met announced on Tuesday.

“Sometimes when you do a site-specific commission it only works for the specific site or in that particular context,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director, said in an interview. “In regard to Wangechi’s works, it’s clear that on the facade they work as these four sculptures framing the facade, transforming the facade, but they also work as singular objects.”

When they were unveiled last September, Ms. Mutu’s caryatid sculptures — traditionally female figures carved into architectural support structures like columns — were the first artworks to be presented from the face of the Met’s building on Fifth Avenue. In Ms. Mutu’s renderings, the figures are released from their supporting role. Instead of helping to hold up roofs or balconies, they sit freely on pedestals."

By Peter Libbey - 28 July 2020

"Perhaps none of her efforts better demonstrates this than Procession (2019), a sculptural group made for one of the outdoor terraces of the Whitney Museum of American Art for last year’s Whitney Biennial and now on view in “Sturm und Drang,” a selection exploring the sculptural dimensions of Eisenman’s work in two and three dimensions from 1994 through 2019 at The Contemporary Austin (which came about when Eisenman won the newly combined 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize). Procession consists of figures that function individually but also together, lumbering in a procession—a parade, perhaps, or a protest. Eisenman had previously employed simple devices for arranging groups of figures: positioning them around a pool, for instance, in Fountain (2017), which was first seen at Skulptur Projekte Münster; an edition of that work now resides permanently at the Nasher Sculpture Center."

By Katy Diamond Hamer - 16 July 2020

"This work is about our need for self-blinding and encourages reflection on our use, as a community, of unknowledge, misinformation and ignorance. The recent controversy regarding The New York Times allowing the printing of a hot topic Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton without proper vetting is a layered example. Who, in this scenario, is the most ignorant actor? The Cotton? NYT? Or us? Is it the Senator, because he recommends killing his own? Is it the “Tombs,” because they condoned his ignorance and then claimed they did not know what they were publishing? Or is it Us’n, myself included, because, well, it’s The Times, and they stand for us all? Well. Maybe they do not. Maybe they cannot. Maybe they have not. For a while now. And we, and we were too self-blinding to admit it?"

By Pope L. - 23 July 2020

"JUST BEFORE NEW YORK issued its shelter-in-place order in March, I attended the closing of Pope.L’s exhibition “Choir” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Entertainment justice adopts a rhetoric of Black empowerment similar to that of the Black Arts Movement in the ’70s. But, as critic Aria Dean writes, Pope.L has reacted to that position over the course of his life as an artist, developing a “hole theory” that posits Blackness’s relationship to trauma as a powerful creative force."

By Taraneh Fazeli - 9 July 2020

"Before he staged his rendition of the tragically misunderstood 1981 performance, Arceneaux spoke to Ben Vereen himself. “I was brought to tears during the call,” Arceneaux said, imagining how Vereen must have felt having his work so taken out of context. “I could sense from [Vereen] that, he knows there’s people out there that care now about what he tried to do 30 years ago. Maybe now is that time.”

By Caroline Goldstein - 9 July 2020

"I learned to love Juneteenth long before I became aware of the emancipation of enslaved Black people. As an adult, I certainly understand the significance of this day and why it is vital that we celebrate and remember Juneteenth, particularly in light of current circumstances. My father is no longer with us, but I think of him fondly on this day and smile when I light my first charcoal briquette."

By Deborah Roberts - 21 June 2020

"“WTF AMERICA?” wrote the artist Genevieve Gaignard on Instagram on May 27, two days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. With it she shared an image of her 2020 collage titled Fantasia, a piece that examines police brutality, innocence, and the white gaze.

“I was obviously angry,” said Gaignard, whose work blends mixed media, sculptures, domestic installations, and self-portraiture to explore race, beauty standards, consumption, identity, and accountability. When collaging, Gaignard—the daughter of a Black father and a white mother—focuses on Black strife and Black beauty by using images from old issues of Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines arranged over vintage wallpaper, a material she remembers from her childhood home in Orange, Massachusetts."

By Jessica Herndon - 17 June 2020

“It’s about receipts really,” Sepuya told Hyperallergic. “I’m not alone amongst black artists who want to see the receipts from non-Black curators, gallerists, museum directors who put up public-facing language in exhibitions about representation, justice, inclusion, diversity, whatever those words mean. I want to see receipts from non-Black collectors to know their interests in Black bodies aren’t salacious and that they are putting their money to defending Black lives.”

By Valentina Di Liscia - 3 June 2020

"It doesn't seem imaginable today, with travelers largely avoiding airports due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, but in a few years passengers departing flights through Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport may not be in such a rush to leave the aviation facility. Instead, they may just want to have an impromptu curbside dance party.

Their desire to turn the sidewalk into a dance floor will be inspired by seeing a series of disco balls greeting them overhead surrounded by an elaborate neon artwork lighting up inspirational quotes from Milk, the first LGBT icon to have an airport terminal named in their honor."

By Matthew S. Bajko - 20 May 2020

"'Environmental grief' describes mourning the loss of nature and its creatures. Coined as early as twenty years ago, the term describes the feeling of bereavement experienced by those who either witness or anticipate the loss of landscapes, plant or animal species, or entire ecosystems as a consequence of human-induced climate change and other intervention. The notion of environmental grief has circulated widely in recent years, steeped in evidence that the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event is already underway, that our global ecosystem is growing weaker and weaker and that the entire biosphere is being irreparably destroyed by human activity."

"In fact, while a strong sense of nostalgia runs through No Go Backs, the longing does not appear to be for some vague return to nature. Flashbacks pepper the film: the boys skateboarding in a driveway, visiting a food truck. One of the protagonists is played by Kahn’s son, and in one flashback we see this character sitting in his bedroom, with a photo on the wall of Kahn holding him as a child. The film’s nostalgia, in the end, is for the world that we live in today, the one we seem determined to destroy."

By Travis Diehl - 14 May 2020

"The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation revealed the 20 contemporary artists receiving its 2019 Biennial Grants, which come with an unrestricted $20,000 for each recipient. Past recipients of the prize are a veritable who’s-who of influential contemporary artists, and this year’s class is equally impressive."

By Benjamin Sutton - 12 May 2020

"Galleries are seeing this project as an opportunity to pursue new ideas and directions. Luis De Jesus, for example, is “really excited to use it as an alternative space where we can do one-off projects with artists that we don’t represent.” The gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles said, “we are aiming to promote some of our younger LA-based artists to help keep the focus on supporting our local art scene.” Other galleries, like Shulamit Nazarian, plan to showcase artists who had exhibitions canceled or postponed due to COVID-19."

By Elisa Wouk Almino - 14 May 2020

"The quarantine selfie is but the newest genre of self-portraiture to emerge in our contemporary age. In this moderated chat, Janine DeFeo, a teaching fellow at the Whitney, will explore how artists including Ana Mendieta, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Adrian Piper have used self-portraiture as a means for expression from the isolated spaces of their homes or studios. Attendees are encouraged to submit questions via the chat function."

–Katie White

"Multidisciplinary artist Stanya Kahn will discuss her latest short film, No Go Backs, with Wexner Center curators Lucy Zimmerman and Jennifer Lange in conjunction with the artist’s (now-paused) exhibition at the institution. The dreamlike, dialogue-free film—which is available for free online viewing through May 15 via Kahn’s dealer, Susanne Vielmetter—follows two teenagers as they leave behind a collapsing civilization to trek into the California wilderness, where they attempt to forge a new life with others they encounter along the way. Shot on 16mm film and scored by original music from artists including super-producer Brian Eno, the late emo-trap pioneer Lil Peep, and Kahn herself, No Go Backs bridges the faded past and the tenuous present in search of a better future."

—Tim Schneider

May 11

"The acute intimacy of the small paintings establishes an ironic distance from Abstract Expressionist heroics. Digitization focuses our gaze on their exposed ground and subjects Fishman’s methods to visual deconstruction. It is as though the viewer can revisit the self-scrutiny involved in her transition from stained grid paintings, like the 1971 Untitled, into gestural works that “came out of my own experience.” She harkens back to Cézanne and Soutine. Here, while the online format amplifies their context, it ultimately leaves out the works’ mute, material presence, so reliant on touch—an absence that adds poignancy to today’s enforced remoteness."

By Hearne Pardee - May 2020

Alexandro Segade's "The Context: Distance" a special artist project commission is in the May issue of ArtForum. The four-page project coincides with the release of the artists graphic novel "The Context" published by Primary Information and now available for pre-order. "The Context: Distance" features the characters from Segade's graphic novel to illustrate the first 10 days of quarantine and social distancing in New York City.

"Artists Nicole Eisenman and Sam Roeck just launched a sticker pack on Apple, titled “Banandemic,” featuring anthropomorphic banana peels enacting COVID-related safety precautions, like wearing latex gloves and masks, bumping elbows with peel-arms, and washing their peel-hands while singing Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” “Bananas are just funny,” says Eisenman. “They’re funnier than, say, a peach. A peach is sexy, but it’s not funny; a pomegranate is mysterious, but it’s not humorous.” The stickers do more than lighten the mood during a difficult time: Each $2.99 purchase goes to The New York Community Trust’s NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund, which offers aid to city-based nonprofits that provide health care, housing, and access to food for those in need."

By Hilary Reid - 23 April 2020

"The work is laced with homoerotic visual culture, and pulls the curtain back – often literally – on the function of the studio. Tripods are often in shot, while orange peel, used coffee cups and Post-it notes add to the mise-en-scene. Black velvet backdrops and mirrors serve as a way to reflect images and bodies at surreal angles, with it often being hard to tell whose limbs belong to whom."

By Lanre Bakare - 28 April 2020

"For Eisenman, who is both gay and Jewish, historical memory sometimes works like a blunt instrument. Against the many crises her painting and sculpture insistently refer to – climate collapse, the imbroglio of electoral politics, the dilapidated conditions of migrancy – we receive, unequivocally and without restraint, the gamut of the artist’s own experience saturated with the calamity of our collective present."

By Shiv Kotecha - 28 April 2020

"The performance complicates the notion of an easy understanding and reading of history, race, and, thus, identity.
The discourse of identity politics presents race as a fixed entity, but how is it
that a category
that identity politics takes to be a fixed essence turns out to be so indeterminate?
Obviousness might be one feature of ideology:
there was no obviousness in Hanging with Clarence.
McMillian—who kept changing characters during the performance—
between the speech of a former civil rights movement activist who is today a conservative Associate Supreme Court Justice and, between songs like “Miss Lucifer’s Love” and others of his own composition,
McMillian as a writer, speaker, performer, singer."

By Philipp Farra and John Story - 15 April 2020

"That resolve is finally paying off. At age 57, Ms. Roberts is about to have her first solo museum exhibition — a big deal for any artist, but especially gratifying for one who, four years ago, was working in a shoe store to pay the bills.

“She’s worked for so long without any institutional recognition,” said Hallie Ringle, the curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art who helped organize "Fictions,” the 2017 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that included Ms. Roberts. “What she hasn’t done, though, is let that stop her.”'

By Robin Pogrebin - 12 April 2020

Now available though our new online shop at shop.vielmetter.com is Paul Mpagi Sepuya's monograph recently published by Aperture and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of his first major museum survey exhibition. The monograph includes an interview with the artist by curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi as well as contributions by Malik Gaines, Lucy Gallun, Ariel Goldberg, Evan Moffitt, and Grace Wales Bonner. Check it out by following the Link below.

"The artist’s installations frequently explore issues of identity and belonging and often employ the signifiers of girls’ popular culture — black and white. (Gaignard is the daughter of a black father and white mother.) The installation above, titled "Be More" imagines a young woman’s bathroom cluttered with aspirational beauty products, many of which are toxic."

By Carolina Miranda - 11 April 2020

"With an intense emphasis on color, the multi-tiered, often column-like structures achieve a fresh synthesis of painting and sculpture. This is more than it may at first seem: Shechet has long been interested in ideas from the West and the East—both Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist teaching—a practice that allows for the invention she excels at to encompass non-formal factors, or rather to integrate idea, desire, and process."

By David Rhodes - April 2020

"I’m a walking craft show. It’s such a misunderstanding. What’s not crafted? Society gives craft all this meaning. I feel there is a spectrum in which we can celebrate making things with our hands, and that’s what we do as artists. I think address the issue head on: craft or art, what difference does it make? People have been arguing this forever. Honestly, one of the reasons I started using clay was because it was so marginalized and denigrated as an art material. I felt it had gigantic opportunities. If you work on the margins, it’s not crowded there."

By Jacoba Urist - 5 April 2020

"Sturm und Drang, a solo show from Nicole Eisenman that’s on view at The Contemporary Austin through August 16, features representative examples of her art. You’ll find a mix of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper ranging in size from a room-filling grouping to individual pieces you can hold in your hand. Almost everything is of recent vintage, with three exceptions dating from the 1990s. The exhibition celebrates the artist being a recipient of the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAGG Art Foundation prize. Based on what’s gathered here, Eisenman, 55, could have won this latest honor for her paintings or sculpture alone, or even just for her works on paper. From this sampling of her career, she emerges as a wily overachiever. No matter the medium, she excels. Besides her skill at making things, she forcefully expresses herself with aplomb, conviction, empathy, bravado, and a gift for visual storytelling."

By Phyllis Tuchman - April 2020

"The incognito images, ironically, compel you to come face to face with the subjects that stipple Sepuya’s life. His manner of disclosing who they are is intentionally as overt as it is subtle. “The thing that I’m intrigued about is intimacy. They are not anonymous if you know them,” the Los Angeles-based artist says, mentioning the familiarity of a tattoo, a gesture. “It is about positioning the viewer along that boundary of recognition or not knowing.”'

By Jonathan Kendall – 3 April 2020

"There is something wildly provocative and beautifully defiant about the work of LA-based artist Genevieve Gaignard. Whether it is posing in somewhat satirical photographic self-portraiture or composing mixed-media installations of contrasting realities, Genevieve's work explores race, class, and femininity with a humorous, pop appeal." ⁠

By Krystal Owens – March 2020

"In what now looks like a very prescient work, Kahn offers a vaguely post-apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles and the mountains that surround it. It is a world without dialog and inhabited solely by teens and tweens. As the film unfolds a narrative of sorts takes shape. Backpacks are hastily packed. Two teenage boys traverse an urban landscape (whether they’re running from something or to something is never explained). As they continue their journey, the landscape slowly transforms from concrete to open grassland and then to an epic wilderness. Civilization eventually recedes and the earth’s natural landscape takes center stage."

By Jeff Regensburger – 23 March 2020

Dear Friends,

In response to the rapidly changing public health crisis we have made the difficult but necessary decision to temporarily close the gallery to the general public as of tomorrow, March 14. Our exhibitions by Elizabeth Neel and Paul Mpagi Sepuya will be open by appointment only. To arrange for a viewing please call or email the gallery at [email protected].

All gallery operations will continue remotely and our exhibitions are viewable on the gallery webpage and via social media. Our staff will continue to be available during normal gallery hours to help you with questions - we can be best reached via email as listed on the gallery webpage. In the next few days we will prepare images and digital tours of our beautiful exhibitions by Elizabeth Neel and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. We look very much forward to staying in touch and to hear your response via email, phone or text and we hope to celebrate the artists with you at a later date.

We will continue to evaluate and update you as the situation changes. In the meantime, we thank you for your support during these challenging times and wish you and your loved ones good health and we look forward to welcoming you back to the gallery again soon.

Best wishes,

Susanne Vielmetter and the Team at Vielmetter Los Angeles

"The densely detailed, intensely chromatic landscape views in Reflections on the Anthropocene are political, semiotic, assertively symbolic and narrative works whose deliberate citations of art history serve as the structures on which to hang not only a discourse of aesthetic agency and modern styles but an incisive commentary on humanity’s oppressive, fetishized, destructive imperialism toward nature."

By Shana Nys Dambrot – March 2020

"Is this the cruelest optimism of all? That we can forever amble happily toward the ever-receding horizon of progress? For a lucky few, the horizon no longer glimmers in the distance, and they make do in the dark. For most of us, the sun still winks from the great beyond, drawing us ever closer to the brink."

By Christina Catherine Martinez – March 2020

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Edgar Arceneaux on his solo exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal (April 9–June 14, 2020), presenting two works by the artist: the video installation Until, Until, Until… (2015-2017) and the sculptural environment The Library of Black Lies (2016). Curated by Lesley Johnstone.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on Sturm und Drang, a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin–Jones Center and The Contemporary Austin–Laguna Gloria (February 27–August, 16 2020).

Encompassing a wide range of media including drawing, painting, and sculpture, this exhibition focuses on the artist’s anti-monumental and enigmatic three-dimensional work, and will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue.

"And in a time where black art is being celebrated, Gaignard emphasized that 'we’re more than just a moment. We’re actually completing the dialogue or the conversation because we’ve been excluded for so long. It’s hard for the majority to process that. We have to make very straightforward statements sometimes.'"

By Makeda Easter – 14 February 2020

"As the art world turns its eyes to the West Coast for the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles—held at Paramount Pictures Studios, February 13–16—make sure to save some time after the fair for these shows across the city.

Drawing on the history of “view paintings” made by artists before the dawn of photography, Whitney Bedford’s “Veduta” series aim to illustrate the effects that mankind has had on the natural landscape. It’s a savvy way of using art history to underscore the unavoidable reality of climate change."

By Sarah Cascone – 10 February 2020

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley on their appointment as the Keith L. and Kathy Sachs Visiting Professors in the Department of Fine Arts for the 2019 – 2020 Academic Year at The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Mary and Pat will work with graduate students and will give a public lecture at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Spring 2020.

"I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.

That’s because his pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about the world in which we live.

Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially as those visions take shape in relationship to others: people with different backgrounds, different upbringings, different dreams."

By David Pagel – 30 January 2020

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Sadie Benning on their solo exhibition Pain Thing (February 1 - April 26, 2020), curated by Curator-at-Large Bill Horrigan. The exhibition is a single installation consisting of 63 small wood panels grouped into 19 discrete and separately titled sequences that extend through three galleries.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Stanya Kahn on her solo exhibition No Go Backs at the Wexner Center for the Arts (January 22 - April 26, 2020), curated by Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lucy I. Zimmerman. The exhibition premieres the artist's video No Go Backs, an intensely visceral, highly compressed work that begins by following two teens, immersing viewers in fragments of their journey.

"Sonsini has painted these same men over and over for the past fifty years, and one has the sense they comprehend and appreciate each other deeply. These are not only paintings but images that facilitate a deeply personal exchange between people whose experiences may be very different, but whose humanity is very much the same."

By Eve Wood – 20 January 2020

"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs of himself, his friends and his colleagues advance portraiture through layering, fragmentation, confusion and a certain kind of trompe l’oeil. They make us question what we see, how it’s constructed, and encourage us to contemplate the relationship between reality and artifice."

By Tyler Green – 02 January 2020

We are happy to announce that Berlin based Tobias Vielmetter-Diekmann has moved to Los Angeles to join Vielmetter Los Angeles as Senior Director of Development and Technology. Tobias joins the team of Senior Directors Kevin Scholl, Ariel Pittman, and Michael Smoler.

Technology has been an important driver in the gallery’s development from the beginning and Tobias’ role will be to further advance the gallery’s operations by utilizing cutting-edge technological solutions. This will include enhancing our state-of-the-art data management and communications systems, optimizing the gallery’s internal workflow and its digital presence for years to come and thus creating substantial benefits for the gallery’s clients and artists represented.

Most recently, Tobias collaborated with Berlin-based strategic consultant and UX designer Konstantin Haubrok (https://haubrok.co) to redesign the gallery’s brand identity and communication for social media, online platforms and print publications. For the gallery’s move to the new downtown location, they developed a new layout for the gallery webpage, which delivers access from mobile devices and a greatly enhanced opportunity to explore the gallery’s programming, exhibitions, news, and portfolios of artists.

Tobias has been part of the team since the founding of the gallery in 2000, up to now working remotely from Berlin in various capacities including the directorship of the gallery’s former Berlin branch. He developed the gallery’s integrated inventory and address management system and has managed its online presence from the beginning. Tobias has also helped gallery artists with ambitious technology-based productions for exhibitions both at the gallery and in major institutions as well as implementing advanced studio archiving solutions and data management.

Tobias holds a degree in software engineering in addition to a BA in Museum Studies from Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin with graduate studies in Art and Visual History at Humboldt University of Berlin. He has worked as Director at Praz-Delavallade Gallery, Berlin, and assisted the Curator’s Office of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Tobias is the founder of the inventory and contact management software WrkLst (https://wrklst.art), which offers cloud based integrated data management solutions for commercial galleries, artists, collectors, and museums and is being used by a wide range of private and institutional customers worldwide.

"A pirate wench with the head of Martin Luther King Jr hangs upside-down from the ceiling, her bosom partially exposed, on the stand of Mitchell-Innes & Nash at Art Basel in Miami Beach. The ghostly figure also leaks a chocolate substance mixed with the paint thinner Floetrol. Altogether, the statue A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On (2007), by the artist Pope.L, is a comment on the toxicity of black stereotypes."

07 December 2019

"Titled The Shape of Shape, it was chosen by the New York painter Amy Sillman, who orchestrated a dense installation that compared and contrasted work by around 70 artists. The result was a visual feast that might also be read as a reminder to MoMA’s brainy curators that pleasure is its own form of knowledge."

By Roberta Smith – 06 December 2019

"Sillman’s eye is sharp and witty. She makes brilliant, often hilarious connections between objects that may be wildly disparate. As part of the opening gambit at the new MoMA, Sillman chose seventy-one works from the institution’s collection, using shape as her conceptual lodestar. Walk around the small, anxiously stuffed gallery and you will recognize aspects of Sillman’s own work: lumps, lines, cuts, and lots of awkward, bulbous things."

By Nicole Eisenman – December 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mickalene Thomas on her appointment as the 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts at the Yale School of Art.

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean Marta Kuzma notes: “We are honored to have Mickalene Thomas join the Yale School of Art faculty throughout 2020 as a black feminist artist whose practice contributes to the evolving conversation around post-blackness, sexuality and power. She is a fierce mentor who has supported emerging queer black artists, through fostering critical conversations and assisting with professional development.”

"When Mickalene Thomas was chosen to create art for the Leimert Park station of Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX line, she looked to iconic elements of the community’s landscape — including the Art Deco-era tower of what is now the Vision Theatre — then collaged them. She wanted residents to recognize the images in the piece."

By Dorany Pineda – 11 November 2019

"Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has worked in performance, video, drawing, installation, sculpture and teaching, troubling facile readings of the machinations that govern the relationships between race, labour, capitalism and materiality. His practice traverses genres in an attempt to reckon with everything from the tenuousness of Black masculinity in public space to the lingering economic effects of post-industrial America."

By Jessica Lynne – 20 October 2019

By Jonathan Griffin – 09 October 2019

"Aguayo’s visual lexicon works because he productively stymies the logic of his own forms and colors before they reach a formulaic point of exhaustion by throwing in red herrings—as with the yellow arches or surprise pops of color painted onto the sides of the raw canvases. The revelation of process, the “editing” of the image made visible, eschews the self-assured heroism of the old guard of abstract painting while upholding doubt as the necessary catalyst of—perhaps the true subject of—experimentation."

By Kathryn Poindexter-Akers – 02 October 2019

Ruben Ochoa is one of five artists selected for the U.S. General Services Administration's Art in Architecture public art program at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry at the US/Mexican border.

Ochoa’s work entitled “Mis Marcadores” takes its name and inspiration from conchas, a type of Mexican sweet bread (pan dulce) and the bread stamp, or “marcador”, that is used to create the bread’s signature crunchy shell-like pattern. Pan dulce has a special place in Mexico’s gastronomic landscape and is commonly enjoyed as an everyday breakfast snack (akin to doughnuts) and during the observance of special occasions such as the Day of the Dead.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on Brown: Videos from The Black Show, a solo exhibition at The Underground Museum (October 5, 2019–February 16, 2020). The exhibition is comprised of video works presented in the artist's major exhibition The Black Show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2016).

Opening night will feature a performance by jazz musician, Alice Smith and a DJ set by Novena Carmel. The event is free and open to the public.

Hayv Kahraman is one of fifteen artists selected to participate in OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project, a citywide public art initiative presented by EXPO CHICAGO and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), displayed throughout Chicago’s City Digital Network (CDN). Kahraman's work will be projected through September 29.

"Known in part for its logistical challenges and athletic intensity, this solo performance, along with other early crawls, was meant to draw attention to the conditions of have-not-ness, homelessness, the forced surrender of verticality, the danger of proximity to the street and the potentially suspect movement of blackness/maleness in public space."

By Mandy Harris Williams – 20 September 2019

"Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, an ambitious triumvirate of exhibitions by the Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, erupts Saturday with Conquest, his biggest group performance, involving some 140 to 160 people representing the city’s diversity in every manner from race and socioeconomics to range of mobility."

By Natasha Gural – 19 September 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Shana Lutker on her installation in this year's CURRENT: LA, Los Angeles' public art triennial (October 5–November 3, 2019), themed "Food." Titled "Contemporary Museum of Temporary Containers (CMTC)" and located at Valley Plaza Recreation Center in North Hollywood, the installation is composed of single-use takeout containers painted a single color and organized by size, shape, or former contents. The work encourages creative reuse and considers the limits of sustainability and recycling at a critical juncture of environmental responsibility.

"Inaugurating what will be an annual commission for the Met’s facade, Ms. Mutu is placing bronze statues of seated women in four of the niches, from Sept. 9 through Jan. 12. Crowned, blinded and gagged by highly polished discs, and born of traditions both European and African, these graceful, commanding figures will change the face of the museum, literally and figuratively. As a test run suggests, they will sometimes reflect sunlight with spooky intensity, in what Ms. Mutu calls “a stunning message from beyond.” It is testament to her belief that, like street theater or religious rituals, art can nudge viewers toward congregation."

By Nancy Princenthal – 05 September 2019

"It is not Genevieve Gaignard’s brazen truths, stinging though they are, but her subtle pricks that linger worryingly— Remember This House (2019) places a portrait of Ava Gardner (as well as other pale relations) on a family photo shelf, and a stuffed German Shepherd dutifully standing guard by the patriarch’s chair—contempt and violence neatly wrapped then delivered to your door."

By Max King Cap – 03 September 2019

"For the first time since the Met opened its Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue, in 1902, works of art will grace the niches of its exterior. On Sept. 9, the museum inaugurates its Façade Commission with a quartet of seven-foot-high bronzes by the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu (pictured), who divides her time between Nairobi and New York City. The female figures are reminiscent of caryatids, seen in both ancient Greek temples and in the centuries-old carvings of the Luba people from Central Africa."

30 August 2019

"Four six-and-a-half-to-seven-foot-tall bronze female figures—part African queens, part cyborgs—will take up position in the building’s exterior niches facing Fifth Avenue that have stood empty for more than 100 years. The sculptures are the work of the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, and this homecoming, if you can call it that, carries all manner of poignant historical, political, and redemptive narratives along with it. An institution founded on the appropriation of antiquities and a Eurocentric view of culture is being turned on its head."

By Eve MacSweeney – 27 August 2019

Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Liz Glynn presents a permanent public art installation "Terra-Techne" located at Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at the San Francisco International Airport.

"Terra-Techne" is intended as a monument to technological innovation and organic connectivity. The artwork consists of six suspended “tectonic plates”, each representing a different continent, from which an upside-down landscape projects from the underside of the continents while an abstract circuit board extrusion sits on the top.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Wangechi Mutu on her commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fifth Avenue facade niches to inaugurate a new annual artist commission series.

For more information, please visit The Met's website.

Mary Kelly: Selected Works, a solo exhibition by Mary Kelly, opens at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (WAM) in Greensboro, NC on September 28, 2019 and will remain on view through December 8, 2019. Kelly is currently a Falk Visiting Artist at WAM. This exhibition is organized by Dr. Emily Stamey, Curator of Exhibitions.

For more information, please visit the museum's website.

"Working at the intersection of race, gender, identity, memory, and popular culture, Gaignard’s work tackles broad social dynamics through the intimate lens of personal experience. As a mixed-race woman, she was and remains deeply affected by a feeling of invisible in-betweenness, and has been motivated by the desire to explore, explicate, and extrapolate from her own experiences some larger truths about the American experiment."

By Shana Nys Drambot - 16 August 2019

"Jones operates according to an unstated social-scientific law, that power is neither created nor destroyed. He does the work of transformation, reassigning power from sources steeped in biased convention, where it had a corrosive effect on humanity, to new vehicles of thought and sensual encounter. Defiance has rarely looked this handsome."

By Leah Ollman – 11 August 2019

"Indeed, one the most disorienting and successful aspects of the exhibition is that by entering the space we immediately become part of a scene. Surrounded by these familiar-unfamiliar anthropomorphic creatures imploring us that “getting emotional waste out of your gym bag is a nightmare of cognition,” we uncomfortably recognize ourselves as players. Following the cue of the cento, whereby the “higher,” authoritative source is subverted through collage, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley wear our subconscious social tyrannies as drag and push them to the point of pantomime, giving us the distance to realize their problematics, then perhaps even the space to laugh at them. Much like an actor realizing that he is not truly Macbeth but merely imitating his words and actions, perhaps a way of discovering ourselves in this overloaded haze of information is to embrace the fact that we are merely playing the roles we’re given. Underneath it all we are fragmented, uncertain, and human."

By India Nielson – 08 August 2019

"Watching Roden construct these collages on the fly is fascinating and offers insight into his process and multi-faceted practice. Numerous times, I wanted to stop the projection to sit longer with his compelling combinations. What is magical about Roden’s exhibitions is not only the power of his painted compositions, but how the myriad elements fit together creating a unified whole."

By Jody Zellen – 08 August 2019

"In the engaging photography, collage, assemblage, and sculptural installation work of Genevieve Gaignard, anything and everything can be a self-portrait. This frequently includes actual self-portraiture but also expands to appropriate and transform arrayed objects of domestic and cultural spaces and images culled from popular media into reflections and embodiments of something both intimate and universal in the life of the artist. Empathetic vignettes for wall, nook, and floor space, in presenting heightened-reality versions of ordinary environments, convincingly evoke what could be read as not only archetypal but also as believably the artist’s own memories."

By Shana Nys Dambrot – 07 August 2019

On September 21, Public Art Fund will present Conquest, Pope.L’s largest group performance to date. Inspired by the artist’s iconic crawls in which he dragged his body across the urban landscape, Conquest will navigate the streets of Downtown Manhattan continuing the irreverent tradition of his more than 30 performative works that have taken place since 1978. In this iteration, a group of 100+ volunteer participants that reflect the cultural and demographic diversity of New York City will crawl in relay a nearly 1.5 mile-long route from the well-to-do West Village to the new granite steps of Union Square via the triumphal arch of Washington Square Park. In choosing to give up their physical privilege, participants satirize their own social and political advantage, creating a comic scene of struggle and vulnerability to share with the entire community. Public Art Fund's presentation will be the artist’s most ambitious yet, putting on full display the power and contradictions of collective expression.

Conquest is the free, outdoor component of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration – a trio of complementary exhibitions organized by Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Addressing the artist’s boundary-breaking practice, the three-institution season of Pope.L’s work utilizes both public and private spaces, and will address issues and themes ranging from language and gender, to race, social struggle, and community.

Pope.L: Conquest is curated by Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, with Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Katerina Stathopoulou.

"At her Brooklyn studio, Thomas explained to correspondent Nancy Giles it's that validation – demanding to be seen – that is part of what Manet intended by including his black model in Olympia: "It's about them looking out at you, and demanding to be seen, demanding the validation – Look at me, I'm here, I exist, I'm present."

By Kay Lim – 14 July 2019

"I think my paintings emerge through color. They emerge through a few different things, but significantly through the language of color and what is happening at the moment on the palette. The colors are almost the domino effect of going through a painting. One leads to the next, edges between colors interact in a way that inspires me onto the next passage or mixing of colors. I spend a lot of time mixing colors on my palette before I even put them on the surface. Mixing is a constant throughout the process, the jumble of ideas that flow through color affects my relationship to them, and how they react with each other, and that always surprises me. They don't do one thing. They're full of surprises."

By Kristin Farr – July 2019

With the opening of two additional exhibition spaces in our downtown location, Vielmetter Los Angeles is expanding the gallery in downtown Los Angeles to 24,000 sqf of exhibition space. We are closing the Culver City space as of July 6 and will be open by appointment until July 30.

Please note our new address and phone number below:

1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021
+1 213 623 3280

Our next opening will take place on Saturday, July 13, with a solo exhibition of Steve Roden’s work at the downtown gallery.

Commissioned by Studio Voltaire, Rand/Goop (July 5–October 6) is a new large-scale installation at Studio Voltaire by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley and marks the artists’ first institutional exhibition in London.

In Rand/Goop, the artists have created a circular narrative for six totemic video sculptures. The protagonists, all performed by Reid Kelley, speak in pithy and often capricious four–line cento poems. The contents are drawn entirely from two sources. Appraisals of Russian–American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivism’ philosophies – limited only to evangelist scholars of her work – are spliced with titles of articles listed on the website of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle, beauty and wellness brand Goop.

"Now in her late fifties, Roberts clearly feels a sense of responsibility towards the next generation. As someone who creates images, she is engaged with how black boys have been represented. Works in the exhibition such as After Stephen, Ulysses and Give It a Try analyse the way damaging stereotypes created by the media are internalized by youths."

By Charlotte Jansen – 25 June 2019

"This fall, Manhattan’s most prestigious contemporary art spaces unite to celebrate the career-to-date of the renowned (and underappreciated) artist known as Pope.L.

Beginning October 10, each venue––MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund––will simultaneously host one component of an exhibition titled “Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration.” The show, collectively, is a mid-career retrospective that connects the artist’s past (especially his incendiary interventions known as crawls, which literally feature the artist crawling along the ground) with two new commissions."

By Clayton Schuster – 25 July 2019

Sadie Benning, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney McMillian, Pope.L, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are included in the exhibition The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA's Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles (May 19, 2019 - Jan 27, 2020). The exhibition is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

"Portraiture has, since, remained at the heart of Raffi’s practice. However, far from traditional portrait painting techniques that situate the subject against a plain and unobtrusive background, his approach delights in the embellishment and ornamentation of every aspect of the painting, incorporating elements like huge, vibrant hothouse plants and swirling patterns. As he says: 'My paintings are generally known for their texture and materiality. Variation and experimental paint handling are a huge part of the process. Often there is some form of vivacious patterning, in the form of clothes or wood grain or plants, or maybe all three.'"

By Rebecca Irvin – 07 June 2019

"Roberts approaches collage with the compositional skills and strong opticality of a trained painter who first learned to draw hands and feet as a child by studying paintings by da Vinci and Michelangelo in her family bible. Her visually intense works are constructed in a devotional way that resonates with the viewer in ways similar to religious masterpieces because she felt called to create them. This politically powerful exhibition is not easy to contemplate, nor should it be, because the source content is so disturbing."

By Lita Barrie – 05 June 2019

"The show reaches its apotheosis outdoors, where Nicole Eisenman’s wild Procession struggles on, rain or shine. One huge, dark-skinned man hauls another, who prostrates himself on the bed of a square-wheeled wagon. A cymbal player rides on the back of a crawling slave. More humanoid figures trail behind, sprouting strange growths, effusions, ropes and sticks — a parade of the malformed but dogged. There’s something oddly hopeful about this shambling spectacle, a sense that the journey is cruel and comical, but the destination clear."

By Ariella Budick – 04 June 2019

Liz Glynn is included in Bold Tendencies' rooftop summer program (May 30 – September 21, 2019) in London with her project Unearthed Underground.

Unearthed Underground is a biomorphic network of tunnels spread over the Bold Tendencies' rooftop, some 22m wide and 15m long. The form of the network is taken from Joseph Bazalgette’s original London sewer system, tracing its tunnel network as it converges across London. Glynn’s installation uproots and re-casts this network onto the roof of the car park. The installation is marked by traces of the sewer's curious history: an inverted dinner party scene nodding to the three-hundred person banquet inaugurating the system, and a lost ceramic slipper from the Queen's parade through the tunnels. As a teenage punk in the 1990s, Glynn watched as indie and punk were subsumed by capitalism and now questions whether an "underground" is still possible under the regime of global capitalism. Inspired by the literature of Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo and CS Lewis - places where the underground represents a darker, fantastic and utopian space - Glynn is equally concerned with historical cases of those members of society operating literally and figuratively in the shadows below ground. The curving forms of the tunnels represent a time before rational urban planning was introduced; in Victorian London, straightening and widening the crocked streets was considered part of a broader effort at moral reform targeting the lower classes. Glynn likens the act of uprooting this sewer – which doubles as a circulatory system – to the current political climate, where the festering discomforts plaguing a society can no longer be ignored.

"Outside, on the terrace, is Nicole Eisenman’s show-stopping Procession (2019), a motley parade of bronze, fibreglass and plaster figures, some of whom will slowly disintegrate in the summer rain. A jet-black giant pulls a cart atop which his pasty pal crouches, doggie-style, awaiting occasional puffs of smoke from his gaping anus. A faceless figure with trashcan lid cymbals seems unfazed by the farts in his face, or the cart’s bumper sticker, which inquires, ‘HOW’S MY SCULPTING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT’. (The answer is very good.) Each figure in this farcical tableau finds dumb, flatulent pleasure in the heavy load it bears – a lesson, perhaps, on how to handle life’s burdens.

Few living artists are as original as Eisenman."

By Evan Moffitt – 20 May 2019

"Sublime is certainly not a word I’d use for the excellences of Nicole Eisenman’s sculptural contribution. Spectacular is, particularly in the context of this anti-spectacle Biennial. Installed on the sixth floor terrace over the High Line, her shambolic tableaus of lurching figures in plaster, metal and Fiberglass embody the exhibition’s history-conjuring, identity-expanding, form-scrambling tendencies, and projects them loud, with a rude anarchic belch of a kind that’s otherwise missing from the show."

By Holland Cotter – 16 May 2019

Organized by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, with Misa Jeffereis, Assistant Curator, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Paul Mpagi Sepuya's first major museum survey (May 17 – August 18, 2019).The artist’s first monograph will be published by CAM for this exhibition, featuring contributions by Grace Wales Bonner, fashion designer; Malik Gaines, writer, performer, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; Lucy Gallun, assistant curator of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ariel Goldberg, novelist, poet, and essayist; Evan Moffitt, writer, critic, and associate editor of Frieze; and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, writer and curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

"There’s no better example of the diversity of this year’s biennial than Wangechi Mutu.

Not just because of who she is, a Kenya-born art star who splits her time between Nairobi and New York, but also because of the way her practice blends painting, immersive installations, performance, video, and other media."

By Ted Loos – 10 May 2019

"In her mixed-media works, artist Deborah Roberts acknowledges the syncretic nature of black female identity. Debunking societal definitions of ideal beauty and dress, as well as stereotypes of social media, she questions the construction of race and the racializing gaze endemic to Western culture. Her collages and text-based works not only articulate a critique of accepted typologies of the unified self but also affirm the untold value of difference."

By Roxana Marcoci – Spring 2019

"I’ve always embraced this idea of dancing with the personal and the historical in my work. I’ve used references to a number of from artists from that era—Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and so on. My plan is not to get at what each individual artist or work means to me; it’s a formal decision more than anything else. For me, it’s like the way I choose a paint brush—it’s a kind of tool that I’m reactivating in my own language. My plan is not to reveal them directly; it’s about hopefully finding ways to transform them in ways that people are going to feel but not necessarily recognize."

By Taylor Dafoe – 10 April 2019

"Nicole Eisenman’s large-scale outdoor sculpture Grouping of Works from Fountain will be permanently installed at the redeveloped 401 Park building in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston in late spring. The work is an iteration of Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain, which made its international debut at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017."

09 April 2019

"In a statement, Eisenman said:

I’m happy to know the fountain will be situated in a place where people are likely to hang out and enjoy some leisure time. [...] I look forward to seeing kids climbing on the sculptures and this piece integrating into the fabric of life in the Fens.

The Münster version of Eisenman’s fountain was so popular in the German city that locals set about raising €800,000 ($900,000) to make the work permanent."

By Benjamin Sutton – 09 April 2019

"Throughout her three decades of drawing, painting, and printmaking, Eisenman has patchworked a world from every possible art-historical mode of figuration, bending styles and techniques easily, and often comically, to her will. In her wildly varied body of work, a sensitively observed queer morphology surfaces."

By Johanna Fateman – April 2019

Organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Hammer Projects: Yunhee Min (March 28 – October 27, 2019) adapts the vibrant abstract imagery of her recent approach to painting to the steps of the lobby staircase, in the first Hammer Project to be oriented to the floor rather than the walls. Min completely alters the surface of the stairs themselves, while also making subtle modifications to the walls and lighting in the lobby to underscore how context impacts experience and enhance the visitors’ awareness of the architecture.

"Ms. Mutu, a Kenyan-American artist known for her sculpture, film and performance work, will create a collection of sculptures for the niches in the museum’s facade. This will be the first time that art has been displayed on Richard Morris Hunt’s 1902 facade. The sculptures will be on view from Sept. 9 to Jan 12, 2020."

By Peter Libbey – 23 March 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on her inclusion in the 58th Venice Biennale. The artist has been represented by the gallery since 2007 and will present works in the central exhibition May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff. Works include Dark Light (2017) and Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017).

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Deborah Roberts. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in April 2019 at our downtown location.

Deborah Roberts (b. 1962) lives and works in Austin, TX. Roberts makes collages using photographs, magazine clippings, and images from the internet, with a unique visual language evoking African-American womanhood to explore the subjects of beauty, identity and politics.

Roberts is the recipient of The Anonymous Was a Woman award was presented to Roberts in 2018. Forthcoming group exhibitions include ‘Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage', Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (2019) and ‘Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary', Californian African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles, USA (2019). Selected exhibitions include: 'Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi', Spelman Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (2018); 'Reclamation! Pan-African from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection', Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia, USA (2018); 'Talisman In The Age Of Difference', Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); 'Legacy of the Cool: A Tribute to Barkley L. Hendricks', MassArt, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (2018);' Constructing Identity in America (1766-2017)', Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, USA; ‘Fictions, Studio Museum of Harlem', New York, New York, USA (2017); 'I know why the caged bird sings', Carver Museum, Austin, Texas, USA (2016); 'Gently Fried', MACC, Austin, Texas, USA (2015); 'The House on Mango Street', National Mexican American Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA (2015).

Roberts' work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York; Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, Florida; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; and Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2016.

Pope.L is included in Arty's list of The Most Influential African-American Artists.

"It’s never what you expect—Pope.L’s performances, installations, drawings, and paintings often play in the edge of the absurd to tackle weighty issues in society."

By Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art – 25 February 2019

Mickalene Thomas is included in Arty's list of The Most Influential African-American Artists.

"Thomas views herself as a painter, but all of her paintings begin with photographs and studies of her subjects—family, friends, former lovers, her partner—often set against stylized backdrops of living-room interiors like those of her childhood. Thomas’s paintings are historical interventions that trace intimate relationships between her practice, the formal radicality of modernism, and its outright plunder of Africa."

By Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans – 25 February 2019

Curated by Jenny Gheith (Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA), New Work: Rodney McMillian (February 9 – June 9, 2019) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art marks the artist's first solo museum presentation on the West Coast. In this exhibition, McMillian brings together his long-standing interest in the representation of the American landscape with an exploration of home as a place and a state of mind.

New Work: Rodney McMillian features a painted abstract panorama spanning the entirety of the gallery, paired with a soundscape interweaving iconic 1980s songs performed by McMillian and the voice of a social advocate proposing radically new language and polices around the condition of homelessness. This immersive installation questions the political systems that promise freedom and equality for all, and highlights the power of the individual to affect hope and create change.

Mary Kelly's site-specific project for Desert X titled Peace is the Only Shelter returns to the Cold War intervention of Women Strike for Peach, a group formed in 1961 to protest against nuclear weapons testing in the Mojave Desert.

The project description reads: A long period of research led Mary Kelly to repurpose Cold War–era peace activism, in this case the anti-nuclear Women Strike for Peace (WSP), formed in 1961. This feminist group initiated lobbies, petitions, vigils, and demonstrations against nuclear testing. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests, mostly in the desert Southwest. The artist notes, “Although the radical peace initiatives of women in the early post-war period have been largely forgotten, the action-oriented interventions of the Women Strike for Peace set a precedent for the non-hierarchical politics of second-wave feminism, as well as the many prominent protest movements currently underway.” This counter-history takes on renewed significance amid today’s escalated tensions worldwide. A central feature of Kelly’s similarly public intervention is the so-called Doomsday Clock, whose hands tick closer to midnight as militarism rises and humanity inches closer to self-destruction. The allegory in Peace is the Only Shelter is reshaped as a bus shelter, itself a representative timetable. The intervention in public space calls attention to vestiges of the Cold War in our contemporary context, employing slogans from the WSP, where normally there would be advertisements, and cartographies of military expansion in the California desert, where there would be routes and schedules.

Locations:

531 S. Palm Canyon

33.815465, -116.546812

457-467 S. Indian Canyon Drive

33.816646, -116.545421

Southwest corner of Ramon Road and S. Indian Canyon Drive.

33.815720, -116.545957

"In Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s collaborative and often funny works, historical events are rendered as featherlight webs of consequences. For this series of paintings, photographs, and sculptural installations (many of which featured the characters—some historical, some invented—that populate their video In the Body of the Sturgeon, 2017, also on display here), the duo struck a more restrained tone, knitting together histories of settler colonialism, the sociosexual politics of naval life, and President Harry S. Truman’s deployment of the atomic bomb."

By Andy Campbell – February 2019

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles. Spanning the entire length of 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, the 11,000 sf warehouse will host the gallery’s most ambitiously scaled exhibitions and provides additional space for both a screening and reading room. It will be used as a second exhibition space in addition to our Culver City gallery. The gallery design was developed in collaboration with TOLO Architecture and Anderson Studio.

The gallery will open during Frieze LA with a preview on Friday, February 15, 2019, and will open to the public on Saturday, February 16. The inaugural exhibition will feature new and historic works by artists from the gallery’s roster: Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Benning, Andrea Bowers, Kim Dingle, Sean Duffy, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Karl Haendel, Stanya Kahn, Mary Kelly, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, Ruben Ochoa, Pope.L, Amy Sillman, and Nicola Tyson. The inaugural exhibition will be followed by solo exhibitions of new work by Arlene Shechet, Deborah Roberts, Sam Levi Jones, Genevieve Gaignard, Andrea Bowers, Shana Lutker, and Liz Glynn.

The downtown gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, just south of the 10 freeway. Limited parking is available on the north parking lot adjacent to the building. Visitors to the opening are encouraged to use ride sharing services.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in 2020.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. His work focuses on the production of portraiture in the artist’s studio as a site of homoerotic social relations, and the potential of blackness in the space of the “dark room.” His work emerged within the queer zine scene of the 2000s, he became known for his 2005 ¬– 2007 zine series “SHOOT” and first monograph “Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited” (2008).

Most recently his work has been included in “Being: New Photography 2018” at the Museum of Modern Art, solo museum exhibition “Double Enclosure” at FOAM Amsterdam and “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” at the New Museum. Other solo exhibitions include “Dark Room” at Document, Chicago (2018), “Dark Room” at team (bungalow) (2017), Los Angeles and “Figures, Grounds and Studies” at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York City (2017). His first museum survey in the United States will open May 2019 at CAM St Louis. Sepuya’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums, The Studio Museum in Harlem and MOCA Los Angeles, among others.

"For some artists, MASS MoCA’s iconic Building Five would be a daunting space to fill. The length of a football field, the 30,000 square-foot former textile mill is the nation’s largest free-standing gallery, and the centerpiece of one of its most prestigious museums. But for Liz Glynn ’03, a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based artist known for ambitious projects like attempting to literally rebuild Rome in a day, it was the ideal setting for a new work.

By Samantha Culp – January/February 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Genevieve Gaignard. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in June 2019.

Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her work focuses on installation, photographic self-portraiture, and sculpture to explore race, femininity, class — and their various intersections. The daughter of a black father and white mother, Gaignard’s youth was marked by a strong sense of invisibility. Was her family white enough to be white? Black enough to be black? Gaignard interrogates notions of “passing” in an effort to address these questions. She positions her own female body as the chief site of exploration—challenging viewers to navigate the powers and anxieties of intersectional identity.

Influenced by the soulful sounds of Billy Stewart, the kitschy aesthetic of John Waters and the provocative artifice of drag culture, Gaignard uses low-brow pop sensibilities to craft dynamic visual narratives. From the identity performance ritualized in ‘‘selfie” culture to the gender performance of femininity, Gaignard blends humor, persona and popular culture to reveal the ways in which the meeting and mixing of contrasting realities can feel much like displacement.

Gaignard received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, in 2007, and her MFA in Photography from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 2014. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Counterfeit Currency, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2018); Hidden Fences, Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France (2018); Prospect 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans, LA (2017); In Passing, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX (2017); The Powder Room, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Smell the Roses, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Daegu Biennial, curated by Ami Barak, Daegu, South Korea (2018); Talisman in the Age of Difference, curated by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); Fictions, curated by Connie H. Choi and Hallie Ringle, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2017); Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture, curated by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); among others. Gaignard has been the subject of articles and reviews in publications including Artforum, Artsy, Cultured Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, W Magazine, Interview, The Los Angeles Times, and VICE, among others. Select public collections include Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; California African American Museum, CA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; The FLAG Art Foundation, NY; and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA.

"Representation as art’s historical, institutionalized function in modern society — which much contemporary art prides itself as having overcome — in Landline appears as a treacherous revenant, introducing the painterly impossibility of consistently staging visual affirmations of the present."

By Kerstin Stakemeier – 11 December 2019

"By titling her new exhibition Landline, Amy Sillman might seem to suggest a longing for the past. But no one would accuse the artist of nostalgia. The show—organized by Martin Clark and containing thirteen paintings, several groups of works on paper, and two animated videos—is set firmly in the present, and makes it clear that our politics are ruling, invading, colonizing Sillman’s mood."

By Rachel Haidu – December 2018

Organized by Shamim M. Momin (Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery), Edgar Arceneaux: Library of Black Lies (November 17, 2018 – June 2, 2019), comprised of an architectural installation, posits that there is no singular truth to history and that even well-intentioned narratives can lock things down to one agenda or cause. Arceneaux argues that the true nature of people and events, which is insistently messy, chaotic, and rhizomatic, is often whitewashed and sterilized.

Structured to recall a labyrinth, the installation contains stacks of books, some readable and some obscured by a crust of crystalline sugar. The titles evolve like a game of telephone, slightly misheard and misrepresented, documenting tomes that figured strongly in Arceneaux’s intellectual history (e.g. Birth of a Nation) then evolving into invented or unrelated ones (Birth of a Night, Nation Goodnight, Goodnight Moon).

Library of Black Lies was originally commissioned by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) and first presented in Paris in Wasteland: Art from Los Angeles at the Mona Bismarck American Center and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin in 2016. Lead support is provided by 4Culture. This exhibition is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art on behalf of board member Mimi Gardner Gates.

"Certainly, she appears to be championing all the things that paintings cannot so readily do, and so the works are particularly mighty, with some weighing up to a staggering 350 pounds. Eisenman also seems to relish in the many playful viewing possibilities of three-dimensional work, and each of her sculptures looks completely different from any given angle: busts are surprisingly opened at the back with cuckoo clocks dangling from them, or little devil spewing water, or a witch brooding within."

By Kate Brown – 08 November 2018

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Pope.L on Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions of his work in New York organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Public Art Fund to occur simultaneously in the fall of 2019.

Through a combination of archival videos, photographs, ephemera, sculptural elements, and live actions, MoMA will present a survey of thirteen early landmark performances, spanning from 1978-2001, that helped define Pope.L's career and are representative of his core concerns. Organized by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, with Danielle A. Jackson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art.

For the Whitney Museum and on the occasion of his receipt of the 2017 Bucksbaum Award, Pope.L expands upon his ongoing exploration and use of water with Choir, a new installation inspired by the fountain, the public arena and John Cage’s conception of music and sound. Organized by Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, with Ambika Trasi, curatorial assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Inspired by his provocative, decades-long crawls, Pope.L will unveil his largest and most ambitious crawl to date. Titled Conquest, the project will involve members of the public to explore the potential and power of collective action. Organized by Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume.

Nicole Eisenman's solo exhibition Baden Baden Baden (November 2, 2018 – February 17, 2019) at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden marks the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

Since her breakthrough in the New York art scene in the 1990s, American artist Nicole Eisenman (born in 1965 in Verdun, France) has been one of the most significant voices of her generation. Humor and a deep sense of reflection on history, art history, and pop culture define her large-format paintings and drawings. Nicole Eisenman is virtuosic in playing with elements derived from a diversity of periods. She cites Renaissance painting while alluding to modernist trends, accentuating these through her anti-aesthetics and a kind of in-your-face brashness. Meanwhile, she creates an alloy of the political and the private, high art and subculture. From this admixture, fascinating, narrative works emerge with their uniquely idiosyncratic formal and technical rulesets – in whatever her choice medium.

First cherished as the insider tip for the artist’s artist, Eisenman has become one of the greats on the art market. With her spectacular fountain system for the Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), she also established her name in Germany. For the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Eisenman’s exhibition primarily focuses on her sculptural work for the first time. On display are more than twenty sculptures from recent years, including twelve new sculptures and paintings created especially for »Baden Baden Baden«. Her preference for texture and the experimental play of different materials and their effects is also visible in Eisenman’s sculptural work: sometimes the bronze surfaces are highly polished; sometimes they appear coarse and dull. At others they even vibrate with color or scintillate with applied fabrics. The physiognomies of the sculptures are nuanced, abstracted or comically distorted. One of the sculptures spits water like an out-of-control fountain, another one puffs and sputters. In addition to the sculptures the exhibition will also showcase paintings, a video work, and a six-part series of wood reliefs by the artist.

A publication produced in collaboration with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König Cologne will accompany the show, with texts by Hannah Black and Hendrik Bündge as well as photographs by Ryan McNamara.

"Sillman’s process has an internal momentum that won’t be quelled until it’s had the last word. ‘Landline’, her first UK institutional show, steams through Camden Arts Centre: as if dossiers have been shaken loose, then stuffed back into a briefcase, her language is unpacked across extended sequences of works on paper, then compressed in the impacted, waxy surface of her canvases."

By Nicholas Hatfull – 26 October 2018

Amy Sillman's solo exhibition Landline (September 28, 2018 – January 6, 2019) at the Camden Arts Centre explores the depth and scope of Sillman’s exuberant practice ranging from the political and social to the emotional and psychological in an extraordinary body of work that encompasses gestural drawing, painting, silkscreen print processes, video animation and zines.

Commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, Full Steam Ahead is Arlene Shechet's first major public art project, which will feature a series of new sculptures in porcelain, wood, and cast iron installed around and within the emptied circular reflecting pool in the north of Madison Square Park in New York.

Arlene Shechet said of the project: My hope has been to reimagine the hardscape of the Park with delight and surprise. New Yorkers rely on the sidewalks, the pavement, and the street as the core of their urban lives. Full Steam Ahead becomes a lively and human amphitheater, softening the hardscape through sculptural intervention evocative of 18th-century garden landscapes.

Arlene Shechet: Full Steam Ahead will be on view September 25, 2018 through April 28, 2019 at Madison Square Park in New York.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman, winner of the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which includes a $200,000 cash award, a catalog and a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Austin and at FLAG in New York.

Eisenman was selected by an independent advisory committee made up of renowned curators and art historians from across the U.S., led by Heather Pesanti, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin. This year's advisory committee included Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and Professor of Liberal Arts at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Lauren Haynes, Curator, Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Eungie Joo, Curator of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Helen Molesworth, critic; and Lilian Tone, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; along with institutional advisor Stephanie Roach, Director of The FLAG Art Foundation.

"Nicole Eisenman’s paintings have long held a dialogue with current events, but the election of President Trump seems to have given them new urgency and vigor. Her latest exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is equal parts lament, lampoon and savage reckoning. It is a must-see mirror held up to our roiling political moment."

By Sharon Mizota – 02 April 2018

"AT 62, POPE.L is inarguably the greatest performance artist of our time. This is exactly the kind of label he would find absurd, but over the course of the last four decades, no artist has so consistently broken down the accepted boundaries of the genre in order to bring it closer to the public, with lacerating, perspicacious and gloriously anti-authoritarian projects that play with our received notions of race and class and almost always cut more than one way."

By Megan O’Grady – 02 March 2018

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Liz Glynn. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in Fall 2019.

Liz Glynn creates sculpture, large-scale installations, and participatory performances using epic historical narratives and cultural artifacts to contemplate the potential for change in the present tense. Her practice functions as a form of materialist philosophy: activating objects through performance, changing materials to trace shifts in cultural value, and embodying the rise and fall of empires through cycles of actions and sculptural production. Her work explores individual agency and subjectivity within complex superstructures in the face of technological acceleration and an increasingly abstract economy.

Liz Glynn (b. 1981, Boston, MA) received her Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard College, Cambridge, MA in 2003 and her Masters of Fine Art degree at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include “Open House,” presented by The Public Art Fund at Doris C. Freeman Plaza, New York, NY, and “The Myth of Singularity, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Her most recent project, The Archaeology of Another Possible Future," a seven-part installation spread across 20,000 square feet, is currently on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues including the Barbican Center, London UK; the New Museum, NYC; MoCA, Los Angeles; the Petit Palais, Paris; Kunstlerhaus Halle der Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Glynn's work is included in public collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; and Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Glynn lives and works in Los Angeles, and is also represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY. Her first solo exhibition at the gallery is forthcoming.

"Spread out on the floor of Rodney McMillian’s Los Angeles studio is a piece of the White House. To be certain, it’s not part of the actual White House, but , McMillian’s handcrafted approximation — its tidy rows of symmetrical windows and neoclassical pediment rendered in a patchwork of floppy white vinyl bound with black thread."

By Carolina A. Miranda – 10 January 2018

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mary Kelly on the acquisition of her archive by the Getty Research Institute (GRI). The archive not only includes research, documentation and ephemera related to works created between 1968 and 2014 but also Kelly’s collections of Marxist, feminist, and political journals, pamphlets and flyers collected during her time in London and Beirut. Notable projects include Post-Partum Document (1973-79), Interim (1984-89) and Gloria Patri (1992). All documentation will be catalogued and made available to the public by the GRI.

Organized by Heather Pesanti, Senior Curator, Wangechi Mutu's solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin (September 23, 2017 - January 14, 2018) presents new and existing works at the Jones Center on Congress Avenue—her first major monographic exhibition in Texas since 2004, and her first solo exhibition in Austin. Anchoring the exhibition is a new, site-specific edition of Throw, 2017, an action painting generated by a performance in which Mutu throws black paper pulp against the wall, creating an abstract composition that dries, hardens, and then degrades over time.

Nicole Eisenman's solo exhibition "Dark Light" at the Secession (September 14 – November 5, 2017) presents paintings and drawings from the past year that respond directly to the 2016 U. S. presidential elections. Recalling earlier works in which apocalyptic scenes reflected relations of power and the individual’s impuissance, the new cycle paints a gloomy panorama of America under Donald Trump and a society that, apathetic and absent-minded, is edging ever closer to the abyss.

The centerpieces of the exhibition, the titular Dark Light and Going Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass, are two monumental and highly elaborate compositions that could hardly be more different.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Pope.L on receiving this year’s Bucksbaum Award.

Established in 2000 by longtime Whitney Museum of American Art trustee Melva Bucksbaum and her family, the Bucksbaum Award recognizes an artist included in the Whitney Biennial “who has previously produced a significant body of work, whose project for the Biennial is itself outstanding, and whose future artistic contribution promises to be lasting.”

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mary Reid Kelley on winning a 2016 MacArthur Award. Commonly known as the “genius grant,” the award is “based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

"With impressive consistency, Roden has shown himself to be a master adapter, a painter who looks long and hard, doubts everything and goes back to a canvas so many times that his finished compositions have the presence of a half-dozen paintings — not to mention styles, palettes and atmospheres — piled atop one another."

By David Pagel – 19 February 2016

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Angel Otero. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in November 2014.

Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) is a visual artist best known for his process-based paintings. Through his innovative process of oil paint scraping, Otero venerates historical oil painting while confronting it head on. Otero's "deformation" approach to painting his works, first across glass and then once dry, flaying the dried paint and reconstructing the composition anew across large canvases, is representative of how the artist perceives the process of reconfiguring both personal and historical narratives. Otero’s work sometimes uses process as a way of confronting deep, personal memories. Instead of representing his life through art, he archives moments within it by creating opportunities of surprise and discovery. His work is a constant negotiation between the individual and art history.

"Queer is here to stay. So are feminism, art history, unruly flesh, anarchic laughter and painting. You’ll find them all in Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993-2013, at the Institute of Contemporary Art here, a spicy and tightly edited midcareer survey of one of the most interesting New York artists to come out of the 1990s."

By Holland Cotter – 25 September 2014